andcurve.weblog - The weblog of Kevin Teljeur. Somewhere within all the noise, there is a note you need to hear.

Today was my first day back at work in 2006, and I proudly joined the aggressive cunts going to work. In fact, I was one of them, cursing the slowness and inefficiency of the fools in front of me. Had one of them keeled over, dead from exhaustion, I would have gladly stepped over his or her cooling corpse in order to get ahead in the crowd, and get to the office that precious 3 minutes earlier.

Yeah, that’s my New Year’s sermon. It’s all about the benjamins, and fucking over some bastard that gets in my way as I climb to the top. I’m putting together my 2006 Plan, and I don’t look forward to the part where I have to think ahead to the next 5 years too, because that’s something I’ll have to do in the next month or two. I’m not getting any younger, and I need to start thinking about what’s next. You can tell I’ve been talking to thirty-something year-old women, can’t you? But it’s true, I have to. I have to think hard about my work situation, and where that’s going, and also about what I’m going to go and do later in the year. Japan and Romania both beckon this year, I’m going to have paid off all my debts quite shortly and be that rare thing in Ireland today, a thirty-something male with no debts (well, none to the bank; I’m sure I owe something to someone.) and in a number of ways free to do whatever the fuck I want.

On the bright side, I went for a run in the morning. I can start my 2006 plan by cutting a few inches off my tubby waistline. And pricing some language learning stuff for Japanese, Czech and Romanian.

More on all of this later, I have to tie up some loose ends, get some shit done and then I can do my 2005 round-up and my 2006 plan. And my thoughts on the first of the political parties here to try banking on xenophobia to win the next election. The Labour party as Brown Shirts? Oh no! There is much to be done and so little time…

La Multi Ani!

Happy New Year! Best wishes for 2006 to all my readers and everyone else generally, I hope you achieve your desires for the year and that you have good health and happiness. That title is ‘Happy New Year’ (or something equivalent) in Romanian. Yes, last year’s phrase was in Czech and this year’s is Romanian, so who knows what next year’s will be. That is one thing I’ve already decided this year, which is that next year I’ll celebrate New Year’s in a country I haven’t been to yet. You heard it here first (unless I drunkenly blurted it out to you last night).

I spent New Year’s with Vlad and Diana and several of their friends (Aude, Bonsa and Alina, with our genial, camper-than-Liberace host ‘Cusin’ and his housemate), and it was a good night. Certainly a change from last year’s well intended but ultimately traumatic snot-fest in the darkest reaches of the Czech Republic, in a willage somewhere with Pavel, Tanya and some friends of Pavel’s. I had a bad cold which was just that night reaching a crescendo of personal humiliation, but luckily it didn’t set a trend for the year. Actually, I tell a lie because a few weeks later I got a moderately serious infection, which convinced me of the security of fulltime employment.

I stayed in Vlad and Diana’s place, which was very entertaining the day after.

I promised a round-up of 2005, a set of photos and I also want to use this blog to do my annual ‘mission statement‘ (sort of a collection of life-improvement resolutions, which I usually package with some sort of catchy and dynamic-sounding phrase. It’s personal marketing.), but it can wait a day I suspect. It’s nothing urgent.

Right, a quick little post about some h0t chixx0rs! That’s right, hot women, and from abroad at that. Now, I know loads and loads of hot women, I’ve dated and had relationships with some of them, and I tell myself this a lot in order to stave off the relentless waves of insecurity and self-loathing. Anyway, as many of you are aware, I was in Romania in Summer of 2003, in Timisoara, and it was one of the more interesting episodes of the last couple of years. I made a few friends there and on Monday night I managed at some point to chat to all of them.

The main square in Timisoara. It’s somewhat Italian, with a hint of Dun Laoghaire

I got there enroute to Serbia (at that stage I still harboured some vague notions of hitting Albania, and maybe looting a few shops or starting a pyramid scheme or something) but I was determined to see where my friends Vlad and Diana were from. Let’s be honest here; in Ireland, until recently, Romania was seen as a very distant country, a grim, nuclear wasteland inhabited by ‘Big Issue’-wielding Gypsies and ruled by Communists. You weren’t likely to meet any ‘Romanians’ in Ireland other than those Gypsies. And then, one day, this guy starts working in the company. He’s dark, latin and somewhat brooding, in a conflicted way. He looks a little bit like Keanu Reeves after a hard night on the town and could do with a shave. He doesn’t say much. And then we find out he is Romanian! A real, live Romanian, who isn’t looking for small change for his poor baby, and in fact doesn’t look as if he’ll start stealing anything! He’s called – get this – Vlad! You know? Vlad the Impaler! From Transylvannia! Dracula! So, that was impressive, and instantly put paid to a lot of stereotypes caused by years of selling a lousy magazine by Roma Gypsies (whose roots are in India, originally). I didn’t know that Romanian was a latin language, or that the country is a very young one, while being a very old nation with it’s roots directly traceable to Roman times… It was every bit as eye-opening as when I first got to know Petr and then Pavel, and learnt about Czech history, lanuage and culture.

Vlad and Diana, Romanians at play. They play a lot, and then discuss it

So, I got there on the train from Budapest in Hungary, and immediately you could see that these were a different race of people altogether to the reserved and subdued Hungarians. They were like Italians, relaxed, animated at times… Latin. Now, I had a series of adventures there right from the outset but that’s not what I’m getting at here; it’s the connections between people. I had a set of numbers for contacts to call, a certain Ilca (I later discovered by trial and error that his first name is Marius and Ilca is his second name. That is Vlad for you.) and Roxana, a friend of Diana’s. Also, there was Horea, who knows both of them, more or less. Marius was off on holiday by the Black Sea, but organised a friend of his to go and meet me – a girl by the name of Oana – something which Horea, once I’d met him and explained the situation, found intriguing and mystifying (which made me wonder if she was a nutcase or something). Actually, I’d say that Marius was hedging his bets; on the off-chance I found Horea hard work, then I was very unlikely to find Oana hard work. I doubt anyone would. As it happened, Oana also brought her friend Michelle and I brought gaggle of Americans I’d met in the hotel I stayed in earlier that day. We all hit it off and I even got my head around Horea’s sharp sense of humour, and they all spoke fantastic Engleza. Something I noticed, in fact, was that by and large almost all younger people there spoke very good English; I don’t neccessarily see it as a good thing, or a cultural advantage, but it was very helpful. Romanians are generally good at language, possibly because Romanian has a Latin base but also has smatterings of Slavic, Germanic and Hungarian in it.

So, that is how I met Oana, who I was chatting to several nights this week. It seems she switched on Yahoo! Messenger for one reason or another last Monday, and lo and behold! I’m on all the time, myself, thanks to the miracle of broadband. We hadn’t talked in quite a while, but we’ll probably chat a lot more now, since we can waffle away online.
Oana (on the left) and Adina eating famous Tiramisu. They were the Popular Girls, and that was quite a night.

Anyway, I stayed in Horea’s (tiny) apartment that night, and caused all sorts of mayhem thanks to a devastating mix of alcohol and dehydration. He headed off on his holidays the next day, leaving me to fend for myself… I also had to catch up with Roxana who was just back from a Hungarian pop/rock festival, and Oana was going to put me in touch with someone who had a place to stay. Also, her friend was having a party that night, which I’d have to go to.

I met up with Roxana, and we hit it off and hung out, after I tried a MacDonalds. Athough I generally boycott the Mac, Vlad had assured me that they’re wayyyyy better in Timisoara. They’re not. They’re just as crap there as here, even though the service is marginally snappier. We went out on the town, rounded up Roxana’s friend Sorin, and went to Oana’s friend’s party…

Roxana at a recent concert, doing her thing. She does that a lot. Concerts, I mean.

As it turned out, Oana knew Sorin too! Whoa. Small world. She’d never met Roxana before though. Great night was had there, it was a lot of fun, Sorin jumped into the pool, some people drank a lot of tequila, and there was a lot of crazy dancing and great music. I used to chat to Roxana a lot online, since we were both at work at more or less the same time, and both somewhat bored. However, I have removed such things from my PC now, and Roxana roams Romania doing French-Romanian interpreting for some people studying factories or something.

Like I said, Oana put me in touch with a guy who had a place to stay. I really didn’t want to stay in the hotel again because although it wasn’t too expensive for me, it’s not what I wanted to experience as part of the travel, and Timisoara’s only hostel had been closed for the summer for some reason. That guy was Faust, who Oana knew somehow (I heard more about that from Faust later, but I’ll keep that to myself for now). Faust talked in a Chicago accent; I initially figured that he’d learnt his English and indeed his manner from watching too much MTV, but as I got to know him better, I realised that he was actually over for a holiday from Chicago, where he was hanging out with the locals. I’d go so far as to say that he was a black guy in a white body… He rented me his grandparent’s apartment for €10 a night (which didn’t go down very well with anyone else, but he needed the money for his holiday in the Black Sea so he could bang some chick his girlfriend didn’t know about) which was fine for me.

Anyway, after variously hanging out with Roxana or Oana, I went for drinks with Faust one afternoon, and while we were sitting in the cafe (Papillon, for anyone who’s been there) some girls were trying to get Faust’s attention. Fabulous, beautiful girls… Faust ignored them. Then, after about 20 minutes of us talking, Faust decided we’d go and sit with them for a bit, which is how I met Ramona.

Ramona, demonstrating the art of Romanian glamour. She has a small cat, too.

After a few minutes (where Ramona’s friend flirted with me; I have beautiful eyes!) Ramona decided I needed a tour of Timisoara, and to explain some of the local history and culture. This is, of course, how I got to know Ramona. We didn’t have too much contact until earlier this year, when she finished college (the same course that Vlad did, I believe) and got broadband at home, so we’ve been chatting a lot since then.

It goes to show the whole ’6 degrees of separation’ principle, and how close people are to each other without realising it… Neither Oana nor Ramona know Vlad or Diana, and Ramona’s connection to them is through Oana via Faust, even though Ramona doesn’t know Oana. So, when all three of them were online within an hour, well, it was a strange but good feeling which inspired me to relate the story about Kevin in Timisoara, and was a fantastic excuse to post photos of stunning h0t chixx0rs.

And thanks again to Oana, Roxana and Ramona for helping me out, showing me around and generally making sure I had a good time (and thanks also to Horea, Marius, Faust and last but definitely not least, Vlad and Diana). This is the short, five minute version, but it’ll do

(footnote: added 16.12.05)
Romania: in case I wasn’t clear about it, Romania is a fantastic place. Yes, it is poor, it needs work but it’s also changing rapidly. It’s like Ireland was only a few decades ago, but people really seem to be trying to move things forward. I know I wasn’t there long but it left a good impression on me.
Engleza: Yes, I’m labouring the point. But I haven’t gotten my head around that fact that Roxana (for example) speaks English better than I do. Oana looks like coming a close second, my jaw was flapping loosely at some of her constructions the other day. And Diana, well, you can tell that she’s not a native speaker because her English is far too good, it’s technically flawless, which always a give-away. Vlad and Ramona are good too, but Vlad is more interested in body language and words for peculiar and probably illegal sex acts; I’d say his collection of words is pretty good now. He speaks buna engleza when he needs to.
h0t chixx0rs: I came across this phrase while looking some article on the web. It’s cool. I made the Romanian adventure before I lost my cherry, so I wasn’t actively trying to chase women, I just (as I explained above) met lots of them. What a waste you may think, but I made good friends and that’s what matters at the end of the day.

Help yourself to questions and if anyone wants to add or correct any part of that, please do…